A hard landing for the ABC’s version of soft diplomacy

Cutting funding and abandoning the Australia Network attacks the ABC’s international role via the back door, argues Rodney Tiffen at Inside Story.

The Australia Network, the ABC’s international television service, has been in the Coalition’s sights — and, not coincidentally, in the Murdoch press’ sights — since 2011. That was when the Gillard government awarded the ABC a 10-year contract to deliver international TV, bringing a definitive conclusion to a ludicrously mismanaged tender process.

So it came as no surprise when the Abbott government axed the network in the budget. The decision came despite the fact that the ABC Act requires the national broadcaster to transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs “to countries outside Australia” in order to “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs” and “enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs”.

The government hasn’t proposed changes to the act to remove this requirement; rather, it has removed the financial means for the ABC to fulfil this role in television. It would obviously have been more honest and proper to seek a change in the ABC legislation rather than attempting to bypass parliament by administrative fiat.

The budget decision is the culmination of a sorry sequence of events. In his last great gift to the Coalition as foreign minister, Kevin Rudd decided to open the tender process for the international broadcaster to commercial broadcasters. With a single exception, no other country that broadcasts internationally outsources its service to the private sector. The exception was Australia under the Howard government. In July 1996, within months of its election and without warning, the government announced the intended privatisation of Australia Television, as it was then called. The decision, made without any preparatory work by any section of the bureaucracy, came as a complete shock to ABC management.

When a decision was announced in July 1997, Kerry Stokes’ Seven Network was the successful tenderer. But three years later Seven stopped the service because it couldn’t make a profit. When foreign minister Alexander Downer called for a fresh round of tenders, the ABC was not among the applicants. To his credit, Downer approached the national broadcaster, and it was ultimately awarded the contract.

But the idea of outsourcing international broadcasting was not dead. In Rudd’s tender process, the ABC faced competition from Sky News, whose owners are the same Seven Network that bailed out in the late ’90s, and Rupert Murdoch, who in 1994 had removed the BBC’s news from his pay TV offering in China in order to please the Beijing regime.

Rudd’s assessment team preferred the Sky tender. Cabinet asked it to reconsider, and again it opted for Sky. (Its grounds for doing so have been kept secret under commercial-in-confidence provisions.) The Gillard cabinet intervened, handing carriage of the tender to communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy; then, seeking to lock in the national broadcaster’s position, it added a provision under which only the ABC or its associated companies could provide government-funded international services. As a result, amending legislation will be needed to allow Sky or any other commercial broadcaster to participate in a new tender process.

Sky News, which has become a valuable part of the Australian news mix, had every reason to feel aggrieved by Labor’s follies, and received a payment from the government as compensation.

The grounds on which Rudd’s committee decided in favour of Sky should now be made public. We might discover, for example, that some provisions were loaded against the ABC. It may be that one condition was for the tenderer to provide extra funds from elsewhere, but if the ABC diverted funding from elsewhere in its budget it would contravene its governing legislation. Similarly, the ABC would be wary of arrangements with other broadcasters that might compromise its editorial independence. We don’t know if such considerations were a factor, and that leaves a hole at the centre of this important episode.

“We’ve had for a long time very serious issues about the Australia Network tender process. Twice the tender process gave that particular operation to someone other than the ABC, and then, because of leadership problems inside the government, the decision was changed. And the Audit Office itself has said that the whole thing was badly done.”

It isn’t clear that the Australia Network could have done anything to redeem itself in the eyes of the new government. In 2014, the ABC won the most extensive access afforded to any Western broadcaster in China, with the Australia Network to be made available to the entire Chinese population. But even such an unprecedented achievement counted for nought.

Scott - You are right - it isn’t just a gift to Rupert (although with 13.2% ownership is still is A gift to Rupert) that other battler and right wing sympathiser Kerry Stokes also gets his cut.

I think the argeument that this decision isn’t looking after Rupert for all his hard work in story management before and after the election simply because other right wing billionaires benefit as well is a little bit of a stretch.

ATVI was simply there to demonstrate the abilities of the now long defunct AUSSAT satellite system. DFAT never really wanted it, preferring radio because it delivered to the people it wanted to reach (those in remote areas who might support communism).

Rudd attempted to dump the service, and the private media saw it as an handy source of revenue to trim up their sagging financial performance at the time.

First, Sky News is owned in equal parts by British Sky Broadcasting, Seven Media Group and Nine Entertainment Co. not just Seven and BSkyB. In July 2011, News Corp. owned 39.1% of British Sky Broadcasting. Rupert Murdoch’s interest in Sky News is limited and easy to overplay. But certainly, the rent-a-crowd at The Australia have been very vocal, trying to shape Coalition policy.

Second, having watched the Australia Network in Asia, I tend to the critique that the Australia Network lacks the careful programming and regular news and current affairs offerings of services like Deutsche Welle or the BBC, both of which are very slick.

However, they are also repetitive, the Australia Network less so. In consequence, it may hold audiences longer than the European services, probably a good thing.

There is a saying in advertising that four out of five dollars spent are wasted. The Australia Network is national advertising for Australia political and economic interests. It seems certain parties in Canberra are wiser than all of us and know, for certain, which is the dollar doing all the work.

Somehow I don’t think Rupert is popping champagne corks thinking, yes, now that the Australian Network is out of the way, I can rule the Chinese airwaves. Besides, he sold his stake in Star china at the beginning of this year after trying to compete against CCTV for a few years with ordinary results. No one wins against the communists.
I think if the government removed the media cross ownership laws, that would be a better reward.